As West Bank settler violence escalates, many fear Palestinians are being pushed to breaking point. Foreign Editor David Pratt, who covered two previous intifadas, examines the likelihood of another...
AT the time when it appeared, it created quite a stir. It was back in March 2002, precisely at the moment when the Israeli- Palestinian conflict was going through one of its most convulsive episodes, that former Israeli attorney general Michael Ben-Yair wrote a controversial op-ed for the country’s daily newspaper Haaretz.
Up until then, few prominent Israeli officials had ever publicly used such terms to describe the uprising that was gripping the region or the causes that lay behind it.
“The Palestinian intifada is a war of national liberation. We Israelis enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities ... we established an apartheid regime,” wrote Ben-Yair.
More than two decades have passed since that article first appeared at the height of the second Palestinian intifada, sometimes known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, that lasted from September 2000 to February 2005.
Not since 1987, when an Israeli army tank transporter ploughed into a line of cars, killing four Palestinian men and injuring seven others, triggering the first intifada, had Israelis and Palestinians been locked in such a daily round of tit-for-tat violence.
Intifada derives from the Arabic word nefada. As a verb it means “to be shaken, to wake up”. As a noun it means, “shudder, awakening, uprising”, suggesting “a shaking off”, as a dog would shake off water, or a person would shake off sleep.
In this respect, it has always expressed the Palestinian desire to purge themselves of all things Israeli or any sense of “Israeliness” that had swallowed up their lives.
Over many years, whenever tensions between these two implacable foes reach new heights, talk of another intifada grows, and right now is just such a moment.
Ever since Israel began its onslaught in Gaza in October 2023, it has transformed the occupied West Bank into another major battlefield.
In that time, more than 1180 Palestinians have been killed, about 13,000 wounded, and more than 24,600 detained, including hundreds of women and nearly 2000 children.
As the American-Palestinian author Ramzy Baroud, editor-in-chief of the Palestinian Chronicle, wrote recently in the newspaper Arab News, Israel’s West Bank assault is not limited to military raids.
Instead, it is “an integrated system involving the occupation army, armed settlers, military courts, settlement councils, demolition authorities and ministers who openly advocate annexation”.
While such a process has been under way for years, more recently Israeli efforts towards the formal annexation of the West Bank have dramatically accelerated.
Earlier this month, Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, ordered the army to prepare to transfer law-enforcement powers in the occupied West Bank to the police, a move seen as yet another by Israel’s far-right government to tighten its grip on the West Bank.
In a statement on August 14, Katz said the role of the army was to fight Palestinian militants, rather than combating settler violence, and explicitly linked the transfer of powers to what he called the “expected welcome increase in the number of settlers” in the West Bank.
The announcement by Katz was seen as yet more evidence of a speeding up of moves to fully annex the West Bank.
“This is not a technical change in who polices settlers. It’s another step in the de jure annexation of the West Bank,” Yael Berda, a professor of sociology and legal scholar at the Hebrew University of Journalism, told reporters.
“Israel governs the West Bank through a deliberately complex legal architecture where military rule over the territory coexists with the gradual incorporation of settlers into Israel’s civilian legal and administrative system. What we’re seeing now is the acceleration of that process,” Berda added.
Within days of Katz’s statement, Israel also announced that it had opened up tenders for the construction of some 1200 settlement homes in a strategically important part of the occupied West Bank, a move many analysts see as the government seeking to end any chance of a Palestinian state.
There was almost immediate international condemnation of the plan to build on the so-called E1 area east of Jerusalem, given that such settlements are deemed illegal under international law. The development would in effect divide the West Bank in two and isolate East Jerusalem.
Despite an Israeli court challenge to the plans by Bedouin Palestinians living in the area and Israeli peace groups, the housing ministry has now issued a tender for 1234 of the 3401 housing units.
At the time of the plan’s unveiling, Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich – an ultranationalist and settler – said the idea of a Palestinian state was “being erased”.
As the land grab speeds up, so too does a broader campaign by violent Jewish settlers – who operate in a climate of near-total impunity – to force Palestinians off their land in the West Bank.
The levels of collusion between the settlers and the Israeli army have long been recognised. Recently, the village of Qusra, south of Nablus, in the central West Bank was besieged by violent settlers who cut off electricity and water lines, repeatedly assaulting Palestinian residents in their homes. Some settlers also set up ambushes along the road, attacking the homeowners as they moved through the area.
In response, the Israeli army deployed an entire battalion supposedly to thwart the settler attacks, but eyewitnesses say the soldiers merely half-heartedly chased a few young settlers over the hills, while troops from another unit joined the settlers in prayers. No arrests were made.
According to the UN, there have been more than 1100 attacks by settlers on Palestinians resulting in casualties or property damage so far this year, putting 2026 on course to be the worst year for more than two decades.
Across the territory, Palestinian communities are being subjected to a campaign of violence whose vocabulary has become horribly familiar, say observers.
“Homes attacked. Cars torched. Sheep stolen. Farmers beaten. People shot. Water seized. Olive trees uprooted and burned. Families driven from communities where they have lived for generations. The pattern repeats from village to village,” was how Soumaya Ghannoushi, Middle East political expert, recently summed it up.
All this has resulted in thousands of Palestinians being displaced, and by July this year, it was estimated that the rate of displacement of Palestinians through settler attacks has reached an average of 17 Palestinians a day in the West Bank – twice the daily average recorded during the previous three years.
Further adding to concerns, say human rights observers, is that violent Israeli settler attacks in the two areas of the occupied West Bank that are actually under direct Palestinian rule have almost doubled since 2025.
According to a report by the Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din, there has been a “rapid shift” in “violence and pressure exerted by the government, military and settlers on Palestinians … from Area C into Areas B and even A”.
This comes as settlers pursue a self-proclaimed “great settlement revolution” in the very heart of the territory placed under Palestinian Authority (PA) governance in the 1995 Oslo Accords and earmarked for a Palestinian state.
Rights groups say that never before have settlers acted with such widespread violence as they do today, and this is exacerbated by the impunity the current government of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu affords them.
A big worry too is that as Israel heads into a general election in October, settlers fearing a shift in governments that currently comprise ultranationalists and fellow settlers could up their attacks even more.
This in turn could lead the Palestinian community, already under the most crushing political, economic and military pressure, to respond with some kind of popular uprising, perhaps even triggering a third intifada.
Predicting when such an uprising might break out is difficult, in part because Israeli security forces also try to forecast such outbreaks and tighten security in anticipation. Lately some Israeli analysts have played down the possibility of a third intifada occurring.
According to an assessment by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA), citing Israeli security officials, while the situation in the occupied West Bank is more volatile than it was a year ago, “it remains well short of the circumstances that triggered the second Intifada in 2000”.
The JCFA appraisal maintains that the “immediate danger is not a large-scale popular uprising but rather the accumulation of isolated terrorist attacks and localised escalations that could eventually converge into a broader crisis, particularly if accompanied by unrest surrounding the Temple Mount.”
It was, of course, a September 2000 visit by Ariel Sharon, an Israeli politician who was then leader of the opposition – and, in the eyes of many Palestinians, a war criminal – that triggered the second intifada with a deliberately provocative visit to the site known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif.
Today, the site in the heart of Jerusalem and the location of the Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, remains the most sensitive flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it embodies religious, national, and symbolic dimensions simultaneously. As Palestinian author Ramzy Baroud recently pointed out, the Al-Aqsa mosque along with East Jerusalem, “are among the few places capable of immediately uniting Palestinians across Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and historic Palestine.”
In July, Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir joined thousands of settlers who stormed Haram al-Sharif under heavy police protection, openly violating the long-established status quo governing the holy site.
Even Israeli security officials who say the conditions for a third intifada currently do not exist admit that one crisis, on the Temple Mount – Haram al-Sharif site for instance – could transform the security landscape within hours.
As the two previous intifadas showed, it only takes a tense political climate and one small incendiary incident to act as a trigger that leads to a full uprising.
Last month’s violence in the West Bank village of Tel, near Nablus, where four Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers were killed during violent clashes involving Israeli settlers, is precisely the kind of spark that could grow into a full-scale intifada.
Another factor today though that differs from the political climate of the previous intifadas is the emergence in the West Bank of new Palestinian armed groups, notably the Jenin Brigades in 2021 and the Lions’ Den in 2022.
These groups do not fit neatly into existing categories. Palestinians from Hamas, Fatah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) have also joined. These new factions enjoy significant online followings and use social media and other platforms to reach young Palestinians disillusioned with the “old guard” within the Palestinian Authority who they see as close to Israel.
If the first intifada was characterised largely by civil disobedience and protests, the second involved intense armed conflict and suicide bombings. Predicting what form any third uprising might take then is, say analysts, as difficult as identifying what could prove a trigger.
“Palestinian history has repeatedly demonstrated this pattern. Neither intifada began according to the calculations of political parties or intelligence agencies. Both erupted when accumulated humiliation, economic strangulation and military violence reached a point at which ordinary Palestinians were no longer willing to accept the existing order,” observed Baroud recently.
While today’s situation in the West Bank is highly volatile, it differs in many ways from when the second intifada broke out. Today, Israeli security forces are more capable than they were in 2000, with extensive intelligence networks throughout the West Bank.
The general political mood too, created by Netanyahu and his ultranationalist allies in government, would ensure that any Palestinian uprising would be dealt with uncompromisingly from a military perspective.
For that reason, many analysts believe that any third intifada would play into Israel’s hands, hence the increased goading from settlers in the occupied West Bank with the support of the Israeli government.
This in turn creates a problem for the Palestinian leadership within the PA, who have less political sway over many of their citizens – especially the young.
Back in 2002, former Israeli attorney general Michael Ben-Yair was right when he wrote that “the Palestinian intifada is a war of national liberation.”
Those previous intifadas cost both Palestinians and Israelis dearly, and the only sure thing right now is that any third intifada would almost certainly do the same.
